Electrical wires are used to connect various devices which need electricity. Products like an automobile or even a washing machine has several devices and therefore tens of wires are required for connecting them. Industrially, instead of running individual wires from device to device, the bunch of electrical wires is prepared beforehand based on position of devices in the product. Each electrical wire has its end terminal suitably prepared so as to appropriately connect with the corresponding location at the device. Also, the bunch of electrical wires is duly mounted with grommets, wire ties, clips etc. Such a pre-prepared bunch of electrical wires with appropriately prepared end terminal is known as a “wire harness”. A Wire harness may have few to few tens to few hundred wires or even more. In fact, the advantage of wire harness is actually in situations of higher and higher number of electrical wires.
While such a wire harness results into significant productivity, consistency and therefore improved quality of electrical wiring on production lines, a single error could cause the entire wire harness virtually useless. The error could be in the form of a wire of wrong colour, size, length, inappropriate end connector, grommet, splice, etc. Also, there could be redundant or missing wires.
The wire harness for complex engineering equipment, like higher end automobiles and aircraft, are so complex that visualization and relating between wire harness design and physical wire harness itself poses a challenge. Patent Application no US 012/0271596 A1, now U.S. Pat. No. 9,507,908 discloses a system and method for airplane electrical system visualization with topology determination. The disclosure includes combining three-dimensional wire harness data with logical wire content, using a computer processing device, and displays a graphical wiring topology within a three-dimensional model of the platform.
There are various design stages for creating wire harness documents which aid manufacturing of the wire harness.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,107,197 B1 describes a Wire Harness Data System for developing modular wire harness document, on the concept of virtual parent harness with multiplicity of one or more core modules, from which a customer specific harness having only one core module can be extracted. The modules may be manufactured as independent parts.
To manufacture a wire harness, correct identification and information of wires, connectors, grommets, splices, ties etc. is required wire by wire. U.S. Pat. No. 6,272,387 B2 discloses a system to aid in the manufacturing, design, testing and repairing of wiring harness, run on a computer processor. The system is primarily around data acquisition and display, locating and highlighting the located graphics on the global harness map. Patent application number KR20030085618 discloses a method for producing a wire harness by using a Mentor Graphics program. The computer-graphics aided three-dimensional interactive application E3D (Extreme 3 Dimension) is modelled by using the data of the circuit drawing. The wire harness is produced by outputting a production order from the UNIX through the use of the form board data, and turning over it to the workshop. These inventions assume that the data being acquisitioned is error free.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,791,336 B2, earlier published as application no US 2003/0006779 A1 discloses apparatus and method for validating wiring diagrams, specifically wiring diagram manuals and creates wires list. The wiring diagrams are validated by stimulating voltage signal. The apparatus can also be used as a troubleshooting tool for detecting shorts in a physical wiring harness. Also disclosed is a method of generating wiring diagram based on validation checks and records. This invention is, therefore, essentially around correctness of schematics and correspondingly of the physical wiring.
As can be understood by persons skilled in the art, discrete inventions are known which facilitate wire harness document preparation and wire harness manufacture there from.
In reality, there are various design stages for creating wire harness document preparation and importantly, several design personnel are involved in developing various fragments, which are eventually collated to create wire harness document and which in turn is used to aid manufacture of wire harness. Typical fragments are circuit diagrams and wiring harness drawings in two dimensional forms and three dimensional wiring harness models, encompassing information from Component Database. It is important that there are no mismatches between these fragments. Currently, such a validation is carried out by skilled designers who can understand and analyse circuit schematic, Wire harness Drawing as well as three dimensional assemblies. Even then, the process is largely person dependent, thus unstructured, besides manual, and no comprehensive system exists to manage such an inter-dimensional validation. Analogous to such situations is the laying out of pipes and tubes in the same manner as wire harness.
Our system and method addresses this lacuna inventively.